Derek Jeter was named captain of the Yankees in 2003. Why is that a big deal? Because baseball doesn’t fucking have captains. It’s an arbitrary construct employed by the Yankees franchise after they decided that literal masturbation would have been too obvious. These people don’t play in a sandlot, they don’t need captains to pick teams before every game, and they’re not a World War II air fleet either, despite Steinbrenner’s obvious similarities to the Fuehrer (though I believe the Yankees have more Jewish fans). Naming a captain in baseball is akin to naming your little sister Princess of your sandcastle, or naming your dog Chancellor of the living room. Tagging right along, the Red Sox, ever the Yankees’ Gilbert-Grapelike younger brother, named Jason Varitek team captain in 2005. Congratulations, Leonardo DeBostono, you get to sit in the front seat today!

The Yankees fined David Wells $100,000 for claiming he was “half-drunk” when he pitched his perfect game in 1998 for, as GM Brian Cashman put it, “tarnishing the Yankee image.” Yes, that’s the same “Yankee image” that includes Mickey Mantle’s Hall of Fame plaque receiving a liver transplant. And the image of Babe Ruth’s backfat jiggling when he would stop between second and third to bang a prostitute. Was Cashman actually serious? Rae Carruth couldn’t tarnish the Yankee image.

New York doesn’t put players’ names on their uniforms, again arrogantly citing tradition as the reason. Yanks, it’s not the 1910s anymore, sewing a name patch no longer requires the death of three Polish laborers. The Copy-Sox are almost as bad, they don’t have players’ names on their home jerseys, as though anyone short of Professor Beantown McSoxfan could tell Kevin Millar from Bill Mueller from Trot Nixon from Mark Bellhorn. Oh wait, Mueller’s the one not striking out 120 times, I got it.

John Sterling’s catchphrase, “The Yankees win! Thhhhhheeeeeeee Yankees win!” is not a catchphrase, it is just saying a thing that happened. How does the inane exclamation of a talentless parrot become the rallying cry of Yankee nation? Tradition. Of assholes.

We all know the Yankees’ payroll is ridiculous, that they have eight players making over $10 million a year, that reliever Steve Karsay makes $6 million, blah blah. But the Red Sox are no better. They gave Byung-Hyun Kim a 2 year, $10 million contract in 2004 and didn’t use him a single inning in the postseason. If Kansas City gives someone $10 million, that player had better play every day, and pitch, and work concessions between innings and sell timeshares in the offseason. If the Royals were paying Brendan Fraser’s character from “The Scout” $4 million, they still couldn’t afford to keep him.

Last but not least, everyone under thirty who said “I’ve been waiting my whole life to see the Red Sox win!” should be gathered together in Harvard Yard and Tommy-gunned. Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and Houston haven’t won in the last four decades, but I don’t see the rest of America pretending to be fans of theirs, and they’re just as much not the Yankees as the Red Sox are. I’m stuck rooting for a triple-A team called the Pittsburgh Pirates and I’m supposed to act like the $150 million Red Sox are underdogs? The closest thing they had to a Cinderella story was when Johnny Damon lost his shoe after misjudging every fly ball that has ever been hit to him. And, whenever a real Cinderella team wins, like the 2003 Marlins, no one gives a shit, because that team’s fans can pronounce Rs.

That’s why you, like me, should flip off the Boston Bandwagon anytime it rolls through your town. Don’t buy into the sportswriter splooge that Yankees / Red Sox is the most exciting rivalry in sports. No baseball games are exciting. That doesn’t mean I won’t be watching intently in 2005, rooting against Derek Jeter and Manny Ramirez and Jason Giambi’s tendons and hoping for an October without “Go Sox!” in every goddamn AIM profile I look at. It just means that when the Yankees win the World Series this year, I will again mask my jealousy with anger and turn my attention to another season of Sisyphean failure for my Steelers. I don’t know, maybe they need a captain.